Pins and Needles

For the past couple of weeks, I've been visiting an acupuncturist. Western medicine has pretty much failed me and I wasn't getting answers that made sense from my doctors, so I sought out the small Chinese woman with a singsong, accented voice and pleasant, slightly shy manner, like a the mother of a friend I'd visit as a child. I had always thought, from the few times I'd been before, that the needles only barely penetrated the surface. When they're tapped lightly into place it barely hurts at all-- just a pinch really, even in the most sensitive of areas it seemed to be more their proximity to nerve endings that caused the zinging feeling shooting out from their point of entry like a metal fork on a filling. So while I was a little nervous when she announced yesterday that she would use "the big needles", I still wasn't thinking about depth, even when she showed them in her hand, over three inches long, next to the usual, short one-inch pins.

Nervous about where the needles were going-- she had been getting closer and closer to the soft parts of my belly, an area about which I've always had a certain sense of squeamishness, even back as a child when I'd imagine all horrible forms of having my guts ripped out by wolves, zombies and men with knives-- my palms were already clammy with sweat. I forced myself as best as could, but without much success, to keep from clenching my stomach muscles as she pushed two needles in a row in a line drawing down from my belly button, then manipulated them while they were inside me, trying to get that electric twinge to extend down my abdomen to where I'd been feeling pain. My delusion of the needles only sticking in shallowly still held as she did this. It wasn't until after when she pointed a shy finger three fourths of the way along the length of one of the large ones to indicate depth that I realized that she'd been twisting it inside me like a dial, adjusting the direction, volume and frequency of that current and trying to aim it against my increasing nervousness and tension.

I'm going back tomorrow to pick up some foul smelling herbs and submit once more to what, when she jokingly referred to it as "torture", was closer to the mark than she realized. I've felt squeamish and flightly for the past thirty-six hours. I could hardly sleep last night and imagined for the first time in some twenty-odd years, spears poking at my belly as I lay on my back and the razor sharp beak of some monstrous bird puncturing it through my mattress when I flip over to the other side. I keep rubbing my stomach as though worried that she's left something in, or somehow done damage, but by all accounts, I seem fine. It was also the closest to pain free I've been in weeks and while that may just be because my mind is distracted by this new unpleasant sensation, I'll take what I can get.

Walking up Is Hard to Do

Every morning, sometime between 6:30AM and 10:00AM, a miracle happens: I open my eyes, usually not for the first time that morning, sometimes for the fifth or sixth, and I struggle once again against the impossible weight of sleep. I fight off the nausea that threatens at the mere thought of lifting my head at the pillow and I look up at the clock-- the one shaped like a monkey-- and I stare long and hard at the time. In the few seconds that this takes an inner battle of epic proportions takes place-- my own personal Armageddon, and against a crushing wave of self pity already pressing me back down into the soft mattress, I throw of my covers and swing my feet onto the floor. I am awake. I'm up.

It's late now and I'll have to be on a 7AM train to Los Angeles. I have work to be done before the morning. Work that I care little about, but it must be done all the same. I have too many promises to get work more accomplished this week than I have time for and this now is work of another sort that I do care about, care deeply about, and I am worried that I do not know how to do it best, that I will not get it done and that, above all else, will leave me wondering who I am against who I hope to be. My home is a mess, I've got bills to pay and budgets to balance to chores and shopping to do and I haven't seen or talked to my friends and family nearly enough. All this on my mind at a time when I would rather be lying in bed and daydreaming. I am overwhelmed, but I am happy. I've got things to think about.